DeepMind’s internal story

As the year comes to a close and my inbox is filling up with replies from outside the company, I thought this week’s Nightcrawler would be a good excuse to recommend some feature-length documentaries.

The first is The Thinking Game (free on YouTube), a five-year portrait of DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. In a way, this is an interesting account of how a small group of researchers pushed the boundaries of artificial intelligence and created real breakthroughs.

Beneath the surface, this movie is really about long-term thinking. AI can feel like it just came out of nowhere around 2022. This documentary shows how misleading that impression can be. The real story began a long time ago. It was years of false starts, doubts, and incremental progress that rarely made the headlines. DeepMind’s breakthrough is the result of a small group of people who didn’t abandon a problem that had defeated scientists for half a century.

Key Quote: “In my opinion, an approach to building technology that moves quickly and breaks things is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing, because we can’t afford to break things and fix them later.”

Real journalism in an era of fake news and misinformation

A second documentary I recently enjoyed was Turn Every Page (available on Amazon Prime), which tells the story of the creative relationship between Robert Caro (author of The Power Broker) and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb.

Like The Thinking Game, this film operates on multiple levels. On the surface, this book chronicles a complex and sometimes fractious 50-year partnership between two men dedicated to communicating great works of nonfiction. More fundamentally, it serves as a kind of meditation on the need for deep investigative journalism in a world that feels increasingly rare.

Important Quote: “People always ask me why I chose to write about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Well, I have to say, I’ve never thought of my book as a story about Moses or Johnson. I had no interest in writing the lives of great people. From the beginning, I saw writing biographies as a way to shed light on the era of the people I was writing about and the great forces that shaped that era.”

Here are some more links that I liked.

Is Tao smarter than Dow? – via Tom Morgan (Special thanks to Tom for being so kind to chime in here.)

Important quote: “Individual investors and traders who consistently believe that they are smarter than the collective intelligence of the people in the market often find themselves in serious trouble. Societies that believe that the collective intelligence of the people in the market is smarter than the Tao seem destined to do the same… In short, I’m interested in whether win-win companies can survive and thrive in an increasingly win-win economy. So the core question I address in my work is: Is Tao smarter than Dow?

Sustaining Organizations in a World Focused on Short-Term Performance – by Wendell Weeks

Important quote: “Dominic Barton calls for a shift from quarterly capitalism to long-term capitalism. He argues that focusing on quarterly profits is not the right way to assess a company’s value to shareholders, much less to society. I agree, and that focusing on quarterly profits leads to underinvestment in large-scale, disruptive innovations that drive growth and improve productivity, while improving product performance. I think it puts pressure on management to focus on incremental improvement and quick returns. Now, Dominic and others have been much more eloquent than I have about what this means from a capital investment perspective, so I’d like to share my thoughts on what it means from a broader perspective, but let me anticipate some concerns and say what it means.